At the top of our brilliantly-belated list of flicks and teevee series we can’t wait to absorb in their entirety during the next year of rich professionally-personal research and entertaining enlightenment for future percolating projects, this show is the one we’re probably most anticipating with acute excitement.
We’d finally achieved a long-envisioned dream of living in Niagara Falls, Canada in 2000 when we started sampling – with, admittedly, underwhelming initial curiosity – this enterprise and, at matrix warp speed, swiftly fell under its spell (especially that truly majestic Emmy-winning main theme by Der Gold-Standard
(Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know it’s not specifically held in supposedly high esteem by those guarding the sacred Starfleet banner, but tough – WE love it, and that’s the only ultimate arbiter that counts, so there , nyahhhhh!).
Aside from spotlighting our favorite Keptin after the seminal Jimmy Tee in Kate Mulgrew’s marvelous characterization,
it also had THE most dramatically-compelling tug-of-strong-wills war-ing evolving relationship between Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine – who we place only after Spock – and Captain Janeway.
It’s gonna be a blast patiently swimming through all seven seasons (and its characters) with the obligatory birth-pains, ups and downs as those behind no less than in-front-of-the-camera
found their bearings and the show ultimately achieved its own wholly distinctive place in the Starry Trek pantheon.
[ And, ooooo, if only their two characters could’ve met on the bridge! Inna word: Whoa!!! ]
The Voyager theme is the catalyst that led me to buy my first Goldsmith CD. Sometime in 2003 I'd watched two old films (The Last Run, In Harm's Way) and liked the music so much I noted the composer - which I never did since the days of Superman and James Bond. My parents watched Voyager (I'd temporarily moved back in with them) so I got into it too. That theme! I checked the composer credit and the rest is history!
A good show. My mom will watch anything with a loveable robot (or hologram). The cast chemistry worked pretty well.
To be frank its the only Trek apart from TOS I've really liked. Was indifferent to Next Gen and absolutely hated DS9 and gave up on Enterprise after the first few episodes.
Voyager had a slightly higher, more consistent level of writing that TNG. I think the Maquis/Starfleet conflict was a missed opportunity, but that far from the Alpha Quadrant, what was the point (story-wise and otherwise?). 7 of 9 was a helpful addition to the chemistry of the show, though I don't think it was necessary to sacrifice Kes. The whole show would not have happened if Janeway left a time-bomb in the Delta Quadrant array, zipped back to the Alpha Quadrant, THEN blew the array. Big plot hole, there.
The finale was a real problem for me. Janeway's actions and the time-travel angle was fairly wrong.
I loved VOYAGER too, especially after Seven of Nine came on. A little-discussed aspect of the ST spin-offs was their wonderful use of source music. While TNG went mostly with classical selections and DS9 had lounge singer Vic Fontaine (James Darren), VOYAGER had the vocal stylings of Seven and the Doctor.
Here they sing a duet that arises out of the Doctor teaching Seven some social skills (and he's falling for her, Pygmallion style): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOdKNiESE0Q
Incidentally, there's a fantastic techo-pop song called "Seven of Nine" by a group called Biological Error. It tells an exciting narrative via dialogue samples from VOYAGER and other Treks. It's pretty cool.
I looked in on Voyager occasionally. It's just programming. A hollow shell. Soul-less. Wheel-spinning devoid of inspiration or purpose. A product for consumption and money-making. A waste, really. An excuse for the younger cut-throat competitive producers on The Next Generation to finally break free of Roddenberry and assert themselves.
Paramount should have abandoned both Voyager and Deep Space Nine. Instead, they should have produced lean mean The Next Generation adventures for the big screen. I wanted to see The Next Generation continue to dig deep and aim high with a new film every two years -- with or without the temperamental Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner -- and I know a lot of people felt the same way.
It wasn't necessary to combine The Next Generation with the Kirk era and then do kill-the-characters-off and blow-up-the-ship stories. These are rank bad films that never should have been made. Paramount never should have gone in that self-destructive direction.
For me, Voyager is a very mixed bag. The first season is a rocky one (as was that of The Next Generation) and the show seemed to level off in quality by the third or so season (sound familiar?). However, once they made it to Borg space, it had a strong tendency to rely on those cube-flying space zombies.
Now, Voyager was never going to be as good as The Next Generation (my favorite) or resort to an all-out war and abandon much of what Star Trek is (DS9) but it did rely too heavily on action and too little on characters much of the time.
I still enjoy it, but there are episodes I choose to forget ever happened ("Unimatrix I/II", "Spirit Folk"). Damn. Now you've made me remember.
I wanted to see The Next Generation continue to dig deep and aim high with a new film every two years -- with or without the temperamental Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner -- and I know a lot of people felt the same way.
I completely agree that more Next Generation films would have been great, but removing Picard and Data is a concept that I've only heard of in this thread. I can't imagine The Next Generation without those two. It would have ended the series long before the aforementioned self-destructive route they actually took. It would be like removing Kirk and Spock from the Original Series' films. In a word: pointless.
Not pointless, because the Enterprise would have continued just fine with Riker in the captain's chair, as Patrick Stewart stated more than once. If M*A*S*H and other programs could let go of major characters and introduce new ones, or not replace them at all, so could The Next Generation. Stewart and Spiner didn't want to make the feature films in the first place, so let them go. Their financial and creative terms for returning only injured the two features that did get made. Paramount should have proceeded with Riker in the captain's chair. The fans would have accepted it, and the films would have been successful.
You must have read tons more about it than me. I never heard a thing about possible features without Data & Picard. Personally, I think they would have sucked. Picard and Data made The Next Generation what it was. I don't find Riker to be that interesting a character so, having lost the best two, it would have been a poor substitution leaving the franchise dead in the water.
In any case, we never really got Next Generation features that were what the show deserved, aside from First Contact.
Welcome Back, R.W. - And Hope Your Adventures Elsewhere Have Been Productive Department:
A coupla O.T. responses to some of your assessments:
Uno: Re 'Temperamental' ...
Has ANYONE in the Keptin's Chair ever generally not been? (Tho, thankfully, that aren't any tales of Mme. Mulgrew's specifically throwing her Star (Fleet) weight around).
Dos: The Emergence of P.P. - Power Players ...
As with Messrs. Shatner & Nimoy (with Mr. Kelley rounding out the galactic trinity), the tag-team of Mr. Stewart & Spiner were the Next Gen's equivalent in that the shift towards those characters considered 'The Money' obviously didn't deter their respective agents behind-the-scenes from not only enhancing their salary but also prematuring shifting the storylines to make sure they were front and center.
CLOUT, not talent, will always - tho not in All Ways - out.
Thankfully, whatever one's feelings about the topic of this thread, its cast seems to have emerged unscathed from such egoholic shenanigans.
I'm rediscovering Star Trek Voyager on Netflix. It's been quite a few years since I last watched it. I find it alot more enjoyable than the recent Trek interpretations.
I'm rediscovering Star Trek Voyager on Netflix. It's been quite a few years since I last watched it. I find it alot more enjoyable than the recent Trek interpretations.
Voyager is the only iteration of Trek that I've liked after TOS. Never got into Next Gen (indeed that show pretty much killed my interest in Trek fandom as the UK conventions became totally Next Gen-centric) or Enterprise and found DS9 dull beyond belief.
Funny. I always loved Kate Mulgrew on "Voyager," but NOW can't think of her as anything but the fierce Red on "Orange Is The New Black." What a brave performance!!!
Voyager is an interesting case in my love/hate relationship with the Star Trek franchise in that the entire premise of the show feels like it was made solely for the purpose of destroying that one thing you usually could depend upon in Star Trek.
"To Seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before."
And yet here is a show where upon reaching the point where no one has gone before, all they want to do is get back home. Doesn't that sound kind of counter productive? I mean, sure. Having a means to get back home is important, but this new region of space could hold numerous wonders that could broaden our understanding of how the universe works. But no, instead everything is built on the premise that all these space fairing explorers want to do is go home.
Now I know you're probably thinking that of course they'll encounter many new species and cultures along the way, but that isn't really their mission. Far from it in fact because a part of Voyager's premise was how much they could incorporate the "Prime Directive" into every episode. So every time you encounter an alien species, you're not allowed to do anything with them.
Another problem with the whole "Going home" premise is that you know that as long as the show is running, the crew will never, ever get back home no matter what means of improved travel they stumble across. Something will always happen that will prevent the crew from getting home and that got real boring real fast.
And while I know some of you here don't like Deep Space Nine, you've got to admit that for a show that took place on a station that hardly went anywhere, a lot of stuff actually happens throughout the course of the series. My favorite example of comparing VOY and DS9 comes in the form of Nog and Harry Kim. In DS9's Pilot episode, Nog starts out the show as a petty station thief who Sisko uses as leverage to get Quark what he wants. Throughout the course of the series, Nog actually manages to develop as a character into someone that the crew grows to trust, become friends with Sisko's son, joins Starfleet to become a full fledged officer and in the end, man a station on the bridge of the Defiant during the Dominion war. And he wasn't even a main character! Harry Kim on the other hand starts the show as an Ensign... and ends the show as an Ensign. No matter how many times he's given the opportunity to save the ship, he always manages to keep that same gawddang rank.
Now let's talk about Janeway, the one character who everyone was so afraid to write for because she was a woman. Despite everyone wanting to have a female lead in a Star Trek series, no one wanted to give her any flaw, any sense of potential growth or any other objective than to get the crew home. It's like if they gave the lead female character any flaw, it would be looked at as sexist because she's weak. So everyone resorted to making her a super strong and never wrong archetype who can do almost anything. Just look at her very first appearance from Caretaker.
She is towering over you with her hands on her waist as if to declare that she's the ruler of the universe. Apparently someone on the design team didn't like the idea of a woman being in charge of a Starship so they designed the bridge so that the Captain's chair would not be centered anywhere on the bridge.
And it's not like the series didn't present many opportunities for Janeway to develop both as a character and as a ship's Captain. They are on the other side of the galaxy with no help and no chance of rescue, so one of the more logical things to do is adapt to your new environment. But no, instead Janeway holds to the Prime Directive and the foundations of the Federation as if it's a dogmatic culture. It's so disappointing.
A few months back I tried to revisit Voyager and got 20 minutes into it on Netflix then turned it off. Just can't get into all the silliness. Apparently in the future everyone plays LARP!
Well .I just started on this.... it seems that i am going to have to suffer through another series of Holodecks and holographic people who can interact with people. Hey, idiots, holograms are projections of LIGHT, not SOLID beings.
At its worst it was pretty darn awful, maybe worse than any other Trek series, although there were some DS9 that were cures for insomnia. But at it's best, such as most of the two parts - like Year of Hell, it was extremely good. The production quality on the show was extremely high, the sets had a solidity.
there 
[ And, ooooo, if only their two characters could’ve met on the bridge! 
Inna word: Whoa!!! ] 
